A growing number of employers are seeking to create an environment that nurtures employee experiences at work. And, a growing number of employees are seeking those experiences. A study of millennials shows that they care deeply about meaningful work. Millennials are looking for autonomy, flexibility, mentoring and connection.
By the year 2025, it’s estimated that millennials will comprise 75% of the workforce. The need to foster enhanced employee experiences is critical. In fact, we’ve already written about it here and touched on components of it in every article on this site.
While employee experience is the current buzzword, it’s also been referred to as peak experiences or flow. Let’s dive in.
Why Creating Peak Experiences is so Crucial For Employers
When employees have peak experiences at work, they perform better. Employee engagement increases and retention skyrockets. Engaged employees make fewer mistakes, perform better, and stay with a company longer.
According to Gallup, employers with high levels of employee engagement report a 22% higher productivity.(create an image on stat) Workplace Research Foundation found that increasing employee engagement investment by only 10% increases profits by $2,400 per employee each year!
But that’s not all!
Harvard Business Review points out that organizations with high rates of engagement have double the rate of success than those without.
Can you really afford to ignore peak employee experiences at your organization?
Understanding Peak Experiences
Employee engagement is a result of employees who experience flow, have peak experiences at work, and have relationships with their team.
Abraham Maslow introduced the idea of peak experiences. When peak experiences occur, the final need in the hierarchy of needs is met and an individual reaches self actualization. Peak experiences are often related to a spiritual experience. They have been called “the flow.”
Maslow referred to them as the most wonderful experiences in your life. In the Handbook for Humanistic Psychology it says; “Peak experiences involve a heightened sense of wonder, awe, or ecstasy over an experience.”
Dorothy Leach described them as “A highly valued experience characterized by such intensity of perception, depth of feeling, or sense of profound significance as to cause it to stand out, in the subject’s mind, in more or less permanent contrast to the experiences that surround it in time and space.
These experiences can include experiences in sports, nature, art, music, service, and many other times.
A decade later, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, another psychologist coined the term “flow.” During flow, time slips away and people are able to focus and lose self-awareness.
Flow and peak experiences bear such remarkable similarities that the terms are used almost interchangeably.
Both Maslow and Csikszentmihalyi realized that you can train to have peak experiences. And, that’s great news for employers who can create environments that foster more frequent peak experiences.
Fostering Employee Peak Experiences, Flow Is Not Complicated
O.C. Tanner, in the 2022 Culture Report, identified the three main components of creating peak experiences. Peak experiences happen when an employee’s basic needs are met.
Employee engagement is a result of employees who experience flow, have peak experiences at work, and have relationships with their team.
Creating employee peak experiences is not complicated.
Employees have three basic psychological needs. Different from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, these three needs are fundamental to human happiness and employee engagement. They are the need for autonomy, the need for connection, and the need for mastery.
Autonomy: Necessary for Peak Experiences
O.C. Tanner identified that peak experiences require employee autonomy to form. Daniel Pink, researcher and author of Drive, The Surprising Truth About What Drives Us said that “Control leads to compliance, Autonomy leads to engagement.” Create an image of quote
Employers give employees autonomy by providing employees the chance to take ownership of part of their work. This can happen by assigning them to be the lead over special projects, encouraging mentoring, or allowing teams to make decisions.
There are many ways to give employees autonomy. Ideally, employees can be given the tools and mastery to oversee projects and make decisions within their roles. Job crafting satisfies the greatest needs of autonomy.
But, in addition to encouraging employee autonomy through leadership and decision making, you can also provide employee autonomy in other aspects.
Flexible work schedules, along with the option for early or late starts, provides employees the autonomy to work when it works best for them and at their peak times. (See why giving employees choices over workspaces increases engagement.) Giving employees control over workspaces also gives control and autonomy to employees.
Including employees in office layout decisions or allowing them to customize personal spaces makes it easier for employees to create an environment, they work best in.
You can provide employees autonomy by providing open and closed spaces they can move between, depending on their needs during the day. It’s an ideal way to recognize employees for their hard work
US Employers Finding Difficulty Bringing Workers Back to the Office
Connection And Relatedness: A Core Employee Need
A fundamental aspect of peak experiences involves connection to colleagues and teams. One of the top reasons unhappy employees wait to leave an organization is the fear of letting down their colleagues.
That bond and connection between team members inspire greater loyalty, increased performance, (new article) and increased moments of flow. When employees experience peak moments of flow, the love they feel for their jobs increases. Their performance skyrockets. Their mistakes drastically drop.
Managers can foster increased employee connection by providing meaningful personal recognition. Peer recognition drives employment satisfaction. Managers can build connections by Building effective teams.
When employees have connections at work, Gallup calls it a “best friend at work.” And the satisfaction and performance results are incredible. Help employees build connections by encouraging them to participate in mentoring programs and by structuring recognition in a way that builds connection.
Without Mastery Flow Doesn’t Happen
An absolute necessity of flow, or peak experiences, is that the employee is doing activities they have mastered. You can increase flow by helping employees to master additional skills and grow in their job. Check out 11 Ways to Recognize Employees By Investing in their Professional Development.
Master happens through mentoring, the ability to make choices and learn from mistakes, traversing failure articles and through clear and individual recognition and feedback.
Encourage employee growth by sponsoring Lunch and Learn events, employee clubs, and 20% time. Encourage additional courses, job swapping, and cross-training.
Studies show that employees want to grow and improve. Without realizing it, mastery is not only an aim, but a need that humans have.
Conclusion
Although millennials have voiced the desire for autonomy, mentoring, and connection, it is a need that all employees have. And each of these fundamental aspects of employer culture helps to satisfy the other two needs. As you build your employees professionally, they grow high-quality relationships. Their competence improves and they make better decisions (autonomy). And, those relationships at work, they improve employee’s skills and challenge them to do better still!
About Thanks
Thanks is a leading provider of a recognition-based platform that increases communication, builds teamwork, and makes recognition a part of company culture. Fast, easy and simple Thanks makes it easy to bring data-driven employee recognition to your entire organization. O.C. Tanner purchased the Thanks platform in 2019 to fulfill the recognition needs of smaller businesses.
Thanks customers benefit from the same decades of research in employee motivation and company culture that O.C. Tanner enterprise clients enjoy, but in a product that is geared for fast, easy and simple deployment. Whether you’re starting a recognition program or improving and expanding on what you already have, Thanks has everything you need to engage your people with effective, scalable recognition.